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Chapter Three - Forgoing Punishment: Dostoevsky’s Third Category and the Case of Ekaterina Kornilova
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62 Chapter Three Forgoing Punishment: Dostoevsky’s Third Category and the Case of Ekaterina Kornilova D O S T O E V S K Y ’ S R AT H E R F R E Q U E N T admissions to having been “happy” when some obviously guilty defendants have avoided punishment offer further proof that his attitude can hardly be regarded as strictly retributivist. These admissions are particularly telling when they appear amid Dostoevsky’s discussions criticizing gratuitous acquittals. One such example occurs in Dostoevsky’s commentary on the 1876 trial of Anastasia Kairova, a woman who attacked her lover’s wife with a razor.1 While Dostoevsky is deeply troubled by her acquittal, he pities the confused and muddle-headed woman, claiming that he was “very, very happy, when they let Madame Kairova go” (WD, 485; translation modified). He believes that Kairova is guilty of attempted murder yet thinks that the jury has been fundamentally correct in showing her mercy. Similarly, in the case of Stanislav Kronenberg, who stood trial for beating his seven-year-old daughter, Dostoevsky does not insist on punishing the offender. He reveals to the reader of A Writer’s Diary that, upon first learning of the trial from the periodical Golos (Voice),2 he was so disturbed with the facts of the case that he met the very same day, despite the late hour, with A. S. Suvorin, the editor of Novoe vremia (New Time) who had been present at the trial.3 Dostoevsky became even more indignant when Suvorin informed him of Kronenberg’s acquittal. Three weeks after the trial, however , Dostoevsky changed his opinion. Having read and heard more about the case, he came to regard the father not as a sadistic monster but merely as a “bad pedagogue.” His violence, Dostoevsky concludes, is not a manifestation of his evil character but merely a result of ignorance. “The [girl’s] father was acquitted and not exiled, and that is a good thing” (Otsa ne soslali i opravdali, i khorosho sdelali), Dostoevsky writes (WD, 358).4 Dostoevsky’s discussion of these two cases reveals that his most fundamental concern is not that the criminal has gone unpunished. Both in the Kairova and Kronenberg cases what he deplores the most is the defense Forgoing Punishment 63 strategies chosen by their respective attorneys and the effects of these strategies and of the verdicts on the public. Kronenberg’s famous attorney Vladimir Spasovich went as far as further victimizing his client’s young daughter— in the course of his examination of her as a witness in the trial—to justify her father’s violence against her.5 Kairova’s attorney Evgenii Utin painted his client ’s crime as an expression of nearly ideal femininity, almost an act of heroism . In the Kairova case especially, Dostoevsky repeatedly states his concern that her lawyer “almost sang praises to the crime” (WD, 475; original emphasis ) and did so from “the still new tribunes of our society” (WD, 484). Dostoevsky’s reference to the tribune is important. As we have noted earlier, for him, the role of the new courts consisted in serving as “a moral school for our society and the people.” But instead of inculcating in the public “truth and morality,” these trials sowed cynicism and confusion (Pss, 23:19). This was particularly troubling in Russia’s fledgling legal culture , where the moral thrust of a legal verdict was especially important to consider. What made matters worse was the vanity of talented lawyers that demanded more than legal victories. Their egos, thirsting for spectacular triumphs whereby wrongdoers would not merely be acquitted but also be justified in their wrongdoings, compelled them to promote equally spectacular deformations of the most basic moral responses in the jury, in the public, even in defendants. As Dostoevsky puts it in his notebook, rhetorically addressing Spasovich, “You desire not only the defendant’s acquittal but justification of the act inside the person [vnutri cheloveka] by his conscience. You need to pervert social conscience [obshchestvennuiu sovest’] in order to make your victory more illustrious” (Pss, 24:137; original emphasis). The unseemly elation of the audience, such as the applause that greeted both Kairova’s and Kronenberg’s acquittals, confirmed Dostoevsky in his misgivings about the moral chaos that trials and verdicts like these wreaked on the public (Pss, 22:51). Feeling that the appropriate moral lessons were not coming from the courts, he used A Writer’s Diary as his own “tribune” to...